Friday, May 14, 2010

Kagan on Gun Rights

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

Kagan, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the high court this week, made the comment to Justice Thurgood Marshall, urging him in a one-paragraph memo to vote against hearing the District of Columbia man’s appeal.

The man’s “sole contention is that the District of Columbia’s firearms statutes violate his constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms,’” Kagan wrote. “I’m not sympathetic.”

I'm sure that's enough for the gun folks to fear her, but is it really all that worrisome? Isn't a 2nd Amendment argument by a criminal illegally in possession of a gun weak at best? Do gun rights people demand total loyalty to the 2nd Amendment, even applying it to situations like this?

I've got an idea, maybe someone should research Ms. Kagan's high school diaries. She might have made some disparaging remarks about guns in them, which would indicate how she really feels.

4 comments:

The most damning thing I have read on Kagan was in the NY Times this week where they had an article claiming she played an instrumental in Clinton’s “Assault Weapons Ban”. That was a long time ago and a lot of people have been educated on the fallacies of that label. Hopefully she is one of them.

As an aside, I found the op-ed author wrote it fairly straight up for NYT until I saw “so-called” in front of “Partial Birth Abortion”, but not “Assault Weapons” or “Gun Show Loophole”.

Considering DC has an onerous licensing process, no legal means for which a person can carry a gun, and the man was convicted of no other crime, I don't consider it an "argument by a criminal illegally in possession of a gun".

I consider it an argument by a man who has been harassed by government agents for no other reason than not having "papers".